Deadline funnels are something we really don’t talk about enough. The fact of the matter is, deadlines can drastically improve your sales conversion numbers. Unfortunately, many people have taken this strategy to a sleazy level. But when used ethically and legitimately, deadlines can have a huge positive impact on your business. Master direct response marketers, like Jack Born of Deadline Funnel, are changing the tides of this useful strategy and illustrating just how powerful it can be.

When you’re marketing your products, you’ll generally see two main segments of people. There’ll be a segment of people who are ready to buy and a segment of everyone else who’s interested but distracted. If you don’t have a deadline for the latter group, you’ll just miss them.

Deadline funnels can be a high-powered way to create urgency for live promotions. When you make these deadline funnels evergreen, the results keep coming in. You can see anywhere from 35-100% increases in conversions when you use this strategy. Read on for next level tips on using deadlines for your business.

Utilize Multiple Deadlines

What works better than one deadline? Two deadlines. Even three deadlines. The first deadline you might use for a live webinar is a bonus for the first x amount of people that sign up for your program/product. This deadline involves your time or your team’s time so it’s understandable to say there’s a deadline. It’s totally legitimate. Your product isn’t ‘running out’, but your time is. All you have to do is send out the bonus to the first x amount of orders you see.

After that, when you send out the replay you could add a surprise bonus that goes away in 24 hours. The surprise factor is key here and will take the deadline to a new level.

Finally, the last deadline is for the core offer promoted on the webinar open until the cart closes. If you offer the program on your website, the deadline may not be to say that when the cart closes it will no longer be available. The deadline may just be for a special discount offer from the webinar. The special deal is the core offer. Using a discount promotion like this is particularly useful for warm traffic from a joint venture webinar.

Create a Payment Plan Offer

I always push for full pays on webinars. But if you wanted to offer a payment plan, you could do that as an additional deadline. Give your audience a few days where that’s an option and increase their motivation to act with a deadline.

You could even open your special payment plan offer after you’ve ended your main promotion. After you close the cart, you could reopen with a payment plan that’s more than the first discounted price so you’re still honoring the people who did act, but also reaching those who wanted a payment plan.

Always Keep it Simple

Simple funnels work better for 99% of people. Unless you have a massive audience and a massive team, it probably won’t be worth it for your time and effort. Keeping it simple, where everyone gets the same emails throughout the promotion (besides those that buy) will outperform any hypersegmentation.

Even if you’re going to get to a more complicated segmented funnel, start with something simple. Every day that you don’t have that funnel complete is losing you money. If it takes 5x as long to make the funnel, you’ve lost that much time to bring in profits.

Not to mention, Troubleshooting a simple funnel is a lot easier than dealing with a huge monster funnel. This is why we specialize in cold traffic webinars. The live webinar is the ultimate minimum viable funnel. If it converts, we continue to improve. If not, we figure out where the leaking point is. Fortunately, there aren’t a million breaking points to investigate in a simple funnel and that can be a huge advantage.

Keep it Ethical for Future Purchases

Gone are the days of having one product. In competitive niches, you have to have follow up products. With follow up products, you have multiple customer interactions and you have to act in a way that keeps them coming back. Everything you do when interacting with clients adds or subtracts to your credibility. That’s why it’s so important business-wise to make sure your deadlines are ethical.

Automated webinars are powerful and bolting on a deadline is even more powerful, but you don’t want to do it in a way that’s sleazy and schemey. For some customers, if they miss the deadline, they’re going to buy the next time you offer. That’s just one reason it’s so important to keep things ethical, honest, and legitimate.

Paint a Picture

We’re always looking for ways to improve the wording and positioning of our webinar scripts and it just so happens that deadlines can be positioned to add value inside an offer with this one tweak.

Studies show that when someone feels like they have to part with something they already have, the perceived value goes up tremendously. So instead of saying, “Tonight the deadline ends” you could paint the picture that they already have in their hands the product, discount, and bonuses. This might look like, “You’re going to lose this if you don’t take action by midnight.”

Illustrating that your customers already have your offer in their hands, but it will slip out their fingers if they don’t take action is a hugely valuable copywriting technique. There’s something physiologically going on with this strategy that motivates your audience to attach more value to your offer. Using that can have a positive impact on your conversion rate.

Deadlines are definitely on my radar. If you implement these tips in a strategic and smart way, you can see great results. As always, try it out and tweak things as needed. Do what’s best for your audience and grow your business in an ethical way.